From the Chaplain – Our College Values: Hope
Here at Junior School, we have been exploring our College value Hope. Hope can mean so many things in our world now – we hope it doesn’t rain, even though the radar looks colourful…we are hopeful to win a footy game…yet we have no control over the conditions, the other team or the players. We hope for all of these things, however we have no guarantee that any of them will or will not happen, it can be a bit like ‘crossing fingers.’ This is different to the hope that is spoken of in the Bible.
Romans 15:13
13 I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Unlike our use of ‘hope’ in our world now, the Greek word for hope which is found in the Bible is ‘elpizo’, meaning to wait for something with great joy and full confidence. Biblical hope, the hope spoken of in Romans 15:13, is not just the ‘waiting with fingers crossed that something may happen’ kind of hope, but a confident expectation that we can rely on God’s character that is good and loving. As our College value explains, hope is to ‘move forward with assurance, regardless of circumstances’, not because of what we can do, but because of the hope as we look towards God who created us.
Darcee Braun, Junior School Chaplain
East Timor Independence Day
Junior School was a vision of red, black, yellow and white today as students and staff observed East Timor’s Independence Day. On May 20th, 2002, East Timor became an independent nation and since this time, Australia has played an important role in helping East Timor to develop as a nation. Christian College has a wonderful relationship with a community in Viqueque with staff and friends of CCG regularly visiting and supporting the school and local community. Today Junior School students’ donations will help to build a kindergarten in the small rural community of Buikarin for the 128 enrolled children and 3 teaching staff. Currently there is a single room for the 128 children measuring 6 x 8 metres.
Year 3 and 4 students and staff took part in a special service to recognise East Timor Independence Day. Led by the Year 4 Student Leaders, the service also included a visit by Mr Graham Barton from Middle School, who answered thoughtful student questions and provided a real insight into life in Viqueque.
Junior School students physically built a kindergarten today, sticking a brick to visually understand and recognise what their gold coin donation will be supporting. We thank our community for your generosity in our East Timor Buikarin Kindergarten appeal today and look forward to sharing progress in the development of the building in Buikarin.
Carla Dunlop, Deputy Head of Campus
What’s on at Junior School
Week 5
Wednesday May 24 – National Simultaneous story time – ‘The Speedy Sloth’
Wednesday May 24 – Prep Discovery Learning
Thursday May 25 – Pupil Free Day
Friday May 26 – Commencement of Reconciliation Week: 26 May – 3 June
Friday May 26 – Reconciliation Assembly, 4B Class Item
Week 6
Monday May 29 – Arthur Reed Photos, Individual and Class (Please refer to EdSmart)
Thursday June 1 – Emergency and lockdown drills
Week 7
Wednesday June 7 – Prep Discovery Learning
Friday June 9 – Assembly, 2B Class Item
Week 8
Monday June 12 – Kings Birthday Public Holiday
Thursday June 15 – Instrumental Performance Evening, R.W. Gibson Centre, 6pm
Friday June 16 – Year 1 Excursion, Geelong Botanical Gardens
Arthur Reed Photos
Arthur Reed Photographers will visit Junior School on Monday May 29 to take class photos and individual portraits. Uniform requirements are as follows:
If wearing the traditional/previous uniform students are required to wear full College winter uniform. For boys- trousers, long sleeve shirt tucked in, tie and jumper. For girls- kilt, navy tights, long sleeved shirt tucked in, tie and jumper.
If wearing the new College wardrobe students may mix and match items based on comfort and weather conditions. Reminder that if wearing the long sleeve shirt, a tie is required. (Please see the Parent Portal Student Information tile for further information regarding the new College wardrobe.)
*Please note uniform items cannot be mixed and matched between the previous College uniform and the new wardrobe.
Other uniform reminders include: shoulder length hair being tied back, hair cut neatly, navy blue or maroon ribbons only, small gold or silver, sleeper/stud single piercings.
Special Note: Prep and Year 4 students who will have their Physical Education lesson on this day are not required to bring along their sports uniform. Instead, please send along runners for students to change into for their Phys Ed session.
A note on glasses – All students who wear glasses will receive individual portraits with glasses on. However, to enable the photographers to provide the best possible quality shot, your young person may be asked to briefly remove their glasses.
Thank you for your support with this.
Ann-Marree Weigl, Head of Junior School
Fractions in Year 2
During our Maths sessions on Fractions this week the Year 2 students have been investigating and learning about fractions of a whole. The students have had exposure to a range of hands-on mathematical activities to explore and consolidate their understandings of fractions and how we use them in everyday life.
The students have explored many real-life objects, such as fruit, cake, pizza, and chocolate bars and learnt how we can divide these items into equal sections to create fractions such as 1/4, 1/2 and 1/8, whilst some students went on further to explore 1/3 and 1/5.
This week Year 2 students were given the choice of designing and creating either a fraction pizza or a fraction cake. Students explored how a pizza or cake could be divided into an equal number of slices and how the number of slices can vary. We also investigated how greater numbers of slices of a pizza or cake mean the fractions that each piece represents are smaller.
The students were very engaged in this task and used a collection of different craft resources which allowed them to be creative in conjuring up a variety of pizza and cake flavours, whilst allocating a range of fraction amounts.
Next week we will further our understandings of fractions as we move into calculating fractions of collections, using prior knowledge from our new learnings this term.
Christine Adam
Ancient Rome in Year 3
This term, the Year 3 students are participating in the Content Knowledge Unit, Ancient Rome. So far, we have learnt about the geographical location of Ancient Rome and the important waterways and landscape formations surrounding this region, and how these were vital for survival.
We have made connections with Ancient Greece and identified similarities such as polytheism (worshipping many Gods) and their government hierarchy. The students have continued to develop their understanding and use of their core knowledge vocabulary through whole class discussions and written responses.
This week we are learning more about how the Roman Empire expanded and how they fought and won many wars. It was also interesting learning about how our modern English language was influenced by Latin due to this expansion in ancient times.
We look forward to sharing more of our learning as the term progresses.
Lisa Johnson
A Splash of Colour
Our focus this term is paint and colour.
Students have been busy exploring colour blending and they have used watercolours, acrylic paints and paint pens enthusiastically to create art works. As a result, there is a keenness to develop skills needed to achieve blending colours and creating texture.
Students have also been given an opportunity to use these acquired skills to collaborate and design a mural on one of the walls to the playground cubbies.
The bright paint is now glinting as the days become cooler and the sky a little grey.
Although the mural is a work in progress there has been great positivity and curiosity from students as they watch it continue to become more colourful with the addition of more paint.
Below are some progress photos with more to come in the future.
Thank you to all the students and parent helper Mrs Keleman, for the creative work so far.
Jennifer Beck-Carlson
Camp Australia
ChatGPT, Generative AI and Young People
Information and guidance for parents
Parents may be aware of the news and hype around recent developments in generative AI (artificial intelligence), especially the digital tool ChatGPT that launched in November last year. ChatGPT reached a million users in five days, and by January of this year had 13 million daily users.
By typing in a specific prompt, a person can ask ChatGPT to produce a written response and it will create it in seconds. It can produce emails, poems, song lyrics, speeches, reviews, recipes, stories, social media posts, working program code, and academic essays and reports. It can analyse text and code, and offer advice on improvements, corrections, and alternative approaches for just about any written text.
ChatGPT facilitates a chat-based conversation between the person and the AI chatbot that produces the output, allowing for questions, refinements, and iterations on the original output until the resultant text suits the intentions of the user.
Since ChatGPT’s launch late last year, there has been an explosion in the proliferation and availability of similar digital tools to the average person – including our young people. Google and Microsoft are racing to build AI tools into their browsers, office suites and search engines, and you may have heard of Microsoft’s new Bing Chat or Google’s BardAI.
Popular social media platforms are including AI features with the same capabilities as ChatGPT into their features, such as SnapChat’s ‘MyAI’ feature and Discord’s ‘Clyde’ AI chatbot. Other AI tools available online allow the creation of images, artwork, and music from a straightforward text prompt.
ChatGPT and similar AI tools have their limitations, including the potential to produce inaccurate information or to return text that has inherent biases. Depending on the AI tool used, it can also be difficult to cite sources or track back and identify where the information originally came from. The free version of ChatGPT is not a real-time search engine and only has access to information up to 2021, so the text output it produces may be outdated.
Generative AI and Education
The proliferation and accessibility of these digital tools for our young people presents both opportunities and challenges for education. It prompts questions for teachers and schools such as:
- What does this mean for contemporary learning?
- How does this influence our approach and thinking around assessment?
- What are the issues of safe and ethical use?
At Christian College, we have begun to grapple with these questions and are taking a careful and measured approach towards the development of guidelines and policy around the use of AI tools in the context of learning.
On Wednesday, May 3, teaching staff from across all campuses were well-represented at an in-house professional learning event introducing ChatGPT, generative AI and education where the limitations, opportunities, and challenges of these tools in the education context were explored. There is potential for these tools to provide many benefits to teachers and students in the classroom setting in future, if used within an appropriate framework that promotes age-appropriateness, privacy and safety, ethical use, and an understanding of these tools’ limitations.
Interim guidelines for staff were released while we work towards developing more formal and robust policy. These interim guidelines acknowledge that most AI tools require a personal account for use and come with Terms of Use that require users to be 18+ or else 13+ with parental consent. As with any online technology-based tool, student safety and privacy are an important consideration.
Currently, student access to ChatGPT and AI tools is filtered, to the degree possible, on their school device during school hours. This is a short-term approach as we continue to review and develop more formalised policy and explore implications for teaching and learning, including assessment.
We’ll continue to consider what this means for our College and community going forward in the context of our philosophical statement, which acknowledges that we live in a “progressively technological age” and identifies a commitment to adopting the best educational technology practices to support student learning. Our response to the increasing availability of AI tools must ensure we enable students to be their best and to thrive and positively influence their world – now and into the future.
Guidance and Support for Parents
I encourage parents to engage with their young people at home, especially teenagers and those using social media, about experiences they may have had with AI tools such as ChatGPT and to experiment and explore together.
For parents new to this technology, you may find value in viewing the video below at home – together with your young person – and considering possibilities and questions that it prompts. This twelve-minute video ‘Why OpenAI’s ChatGPT is Such a Big Deal’, though produced by American news channel CNBC, provides an engaging and accessible overview of ChatGPT, generative AI, its limitations and possible future impacts.
- View the video: Why OpenAI’s ChatGPT is Such a Big Deal (CNBC, February 2023)
I also highly recommend the two parent support articles below. While they both focus primarily on ChatGPT, the guidance and parent advice can be equally applied to any generative AI tool.
- Guide to ChatGPT for Parents and Caregivers (Common Sense Media)
- ChatGPT and its Role in Education (parent advice on our CCG Online Safety Hub)
Parents and young people should be aware that:
- ChatGPT and AI tools like it can get things wrong, and their information shouldn’t be trusted.
- Confidential or personally identifiable information (such as names) should not be entered into AI tools as part of a prompt due to risks to privacy.
- These tools have clear Terms of Use, requiring that users are over 18, or at least 13 if they have parental consent to use them.
- AI-generated content should not be used in the context of school without discussion and explicit approval by their teacher, and only in specific cases. Parental consent will be sought for such activities.
- It is important to be mindful of privacy when using AI tools, and personal information shouldn’t be included in data provided to them (for example, as part of a prompt).
It is important for parents to know that the use of AI tools will not be introduced by teachers in the context of learning activities and assessments for now, and this will only occur in future with careful planning, communication, and explicit consent from relevant parents.
Brendan Vanderkley, Director of Digital Learning
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